A WAITER charged with sex crimes against four women dismissed as “nonsense, nonsense, nonsense” claims that he groped a 23-year-old woman and tried to pull her trousers down near Boots in Coney Street, a jury heard.

Mark Thompson was responding to police questions about the woman’s allegations that he tried to rape her in the early hours of February 22, 2009, as he and a friend were walking towards the Willow nightclub. He claimed she went across to him and started kissing him.

The prosecution claim she screamed and was repeatedly telling him to get off her.

Referring to a different incident he claimed he only wanted to have a conversation with a second woman when he went into her bedroom late at night with his belt unbuckled and his trouser button undone.

He alleged he had been on his way to the toilet and had been set up by her housemates who wanted the two of them to get together.

Thompson, 36, of Hospital Fields Road, off Fulford Road in York, denies nine charges involving four different women between 2009 and 2013, including three of rape, one of attempted rape and one of kidnap.

The 23-year-old woman alleges Thompson kissed her on the neck in 2009 and when she told him to stop, he responded by telling her he was going to have sex with her and tried to pull down her trousers.

Thompson said in a 2009 police interview read to the jury that the allegations were “nonsense, nonsense, nonsense” because he wasn’t that type of man and there was no point in doing that kind of thing in the street.

Referring to the second incident in a 2013 police interview, he denied prosecution allegations that he had been asked to leave her home by one of her housemates because he was making her so uncomfortable by his behaviour. He was later allowed to stay the night after he argued with his wife.

The interview was after his arrest in October 2013 on allegations that he kidnapped a third woman, a 21-year-old student in the city centre, took her off in his van and repeatedly raped her.

Retired police officer Shaun Foster yesterday told the jury the 21-year-old had looked as though she had been crying when she approached him when he was out walking his dog in a York suburb shortly after getting out of the van when it stopped at a red traffic light. She first asked for help, claiming she was being followed by a man in a white car.

Then when he told her he was a retired police officer, she said: “I have been raped.”

The trial continues.